Vivante GC 6400 GPU beats Tegra 4

We have mentioned that Vivante, a relatively new mobile GPU IP provider, grew its market share from 0.3 percent last year to 9.8 percent in the first half of 2013. When we say mobile here we mean tablets and phones and you can check out the original story here.

Vivante had several important design wins with Google Chromecast, Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 as well as Huawei’s Ascend P6 mobile phone. Vivante IP found its place several interesting products, but more importantly the company’s future roadmap looks good.

A GPU called GC6400, based on new Vega core, comes with 16 shares, 533 million triangles a second and up to 8 Gigapixels a second and 128Gigaflops. All this gets placed in 16.4 square millimetres using the 28 nanometre High Performance process. Is shows quite good performance for its 800MHz clock and 1GHz shader clock.

The rest of specification includes support for Android 4.0 to 4.4 and beyond, Windows 8 RT and Windows Phone, OpenGL ES 3.0 and below, DirectX11 with 9.3 subset, along with Shader model 3.0 and Open CL 1.2 and draft 2.0. It also supports desktop Open GL version 3.x and 2.x, WebGL and render filter script.

Vivante’s GC6400 GPU should end up significantly faster than Nvidia’s Tegra 4. The numbers that we saw for Tegra 4 are as follows: in GL Benchmark 2.7 Nvidia’s Shield console scores 21 FPS, in HP’s Slatebook 10 X2 (Tegra 4, passively cooled) scores 17 FPS while the Vivante GC6400 scores 30 FPS in the same test. Adreno 330 from Qualcomm scores 26 FPS in the same test, while ARM’s Mali T628 GPU scores 24 FPS. Vivante is clearly the fastest of the lot.

In GL Benchmark 2.5 Shield Tegra 4 scores 56 FPS, HP Slatebook 10 X2 scores 50 FPS while GC6400 from Vivante scores 70. Adreno 330 scores 58 FPS while Mali T628 MP8 scores 72 FPS in the same test. Mali 628 MP8 wins by a small margin, but this still shows that Vivante is an upcoming player in the IP GPU market.

We know that Nvidia will soon introduce a significantly faster Kepler based graphics in the Tegra 5, but at the same time this leaves Vivante plenty of room to become a graphics runner up that can make a big difference in the market. Getting the Cromecast deal that will result in millions of shipped chips is a romantic Silicon Valley success story.